'Barbara' review: Life is difficult when you live on Uneasy Street

A doctor in East Germany (Nina Hoss) is paranoid, and has every right to be, in Barbara.

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Someone who breaks into the title character's apartment in "Barbara" turns out to be a pal. Someone else befriends Barbara, but there's a good chance he means to harm her. No one in Barbara's world can be taken at face value.

The claustrophobic "Barbara" is about not being able to trust. Barbara is a doctor in 1980s East Germany who is kind to her patients, because she knows where she stands with them, but not to anyone else. The East German secret police, the Stasi, are suspicious of her for reasons we don't know. Maybe because she dreams of West Germany? And there's more: She is subject to random searches, and there are often cars waiting outside her house for no apparent reason.

So, yes, Barbara is paranoid, but also yes, she has good reason to be.

Christian Petzold, who made "Jerichow" and "Yella," is a German filmmaker with a gift for creating gradually mounting unease. His "Barbara" doesn't have a predictable arc, and it seems to have no agenda other than to remind us that this sort of behavior was still happening in a Western country less than three decades ago.

It's a deliberate, reserved film, so little things mean a lot. That's why, for instance, the first time intense Barbara smiles -- more than 90 minutes into the movie --- it makes such a big impact.

The movie's concerns, too, are small. Plot-wise, it's mostly about whether Barbara can fit in at a new workplace and whether she can trust her new co-workers while also attempting to do right by her patients.

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But lives do hang in the balance. And Petzold and Nina Hoss, who is fierce and uncompromising as Barbara, draw us so completely into this world that its tiny details add up to something huge: a country where the way of life is about to change and where it can't happen soon enough.